Makers Academy Week 9
Makerthon + Final Project Jamboree
September 14th — September 20th
This week at Makers Academy was exceptionally fun. Before I tell you about it I would like to share a few things I’ve realized recently.
- I don’t struggle with the struggle at all.
- I can now find good documentation and examples quickly.
- The more I learn the more I learn how much don’t know, and its great!
These 3 items are so key, and they ultimately kept me from learning to code independently. The struggle is real, but it doesn’t have to hurt so bad. Over the past 9 weeks it has become the norm, and i’ve learned to enjoy it. Nothing great in life is achieved easily, and I got in to this type work seeking this challenge.
Documentation was one very big, scary thing that really discouraged me when initially learning to code. There is so much out there on the internet, you really need people guiding you on what to read and where to seek answers. Makers Academy has been great at doing just that.
Lastly, prior to Makers I thought there was a finite amount of information that one must know to call himself a developer. At the end of the day developers are always learning something new, there will be things that click immediately, and things that will always be a struggle to grasp. This is what is so great about working in pairs and better yet, a team, because two minds are truly better than one.
MAKERTHON!!
Makerthon is a 2.5 day event similar to a hackathon, but were we write proper code, — fully tested, no hacking. Monday morning we pitched about a dozen ideas, and narrowed it down to 5 for projects. A live polling application, A clone of the hit game agar.io, a scraper to search Meetup.com for events with free beer, a website to search for the highest ranking pub serving beer on Yelp, and a professional network for Makers students. All projects were really well done, especially given they were done in such a short tie frame.
I ended up working on the live polling application. I learned a lot of new things including the use of websockets for real time data posting. I also used d3.js to animate the poll graph. I am definitely keen on doing more with d3, the data visualizations are so incredible! We presented our project on Wednesday and had a few laptops and phones out to demonstrate the functionality — it was a hit. In 2.5 days we went from pitching ideas to an mvp, I consider the project a success.
Final project Jamboree
Wednesday we also did the final project jamboree, a fast paced pitch session for final project ideas. There were loads of ideas, upwards to 30 — we are quite the creative out of the box thinking bunch. We voted on all of them and and narrowed it down to 10, 5 which will be developed. I am super excited because my idea is one of the 10 selected, hopefully enough people want to join me to do it! I can’t believe it, next week we will be working on our final projects. I really want to make something that i’m proud of, I have high hopes that I will. More to come next week!
